Plant species and communities often reflect historic fire regimes via ecological and evolutionary responses to recurrent fires. Plant communities of the southeastern USA experience a wide array of fire regimes, perhaps nowhere more marked than the juxtaposition of fire-prone uplands and adjacent mesic ravines along Florida's Apalachicola River. The ravines contain many endemic and disjunct spec...

Tropical grasses fuel the majority of fires on Earth. In fire-prone landscapes, enhanced flammability may be adaptive for grasses via the maintenance of an open canopy and an increase in spatiotemporal opportunities for recruitment and regeneration. In addition, by burning intensely but briefly, high flammability may protect resprouting buds from lethal temperatures. Despite these potential ben...

Traits, such as resprouting, serotiny and germination by heat and smoke, are adaptive in fire-prone environments. However, plants are not adapted to fire per se but to fire regimes. Species can be threatened when humans alter the regime, often by increasing or decreasing fire frequency. Fire-adaptive traits are potentially the result of different evolutionary pathways. Distinguishing between tr...

To study how fire or herbicide use influences longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.) overstory and understory vegetation, five treatments were initiated in a 5–6-year-old longleaf pine stand: check, biennial arborescent plant control by directed herbicide application, and biennial burning inMarch,May, or July. The herbicide or prescribed fire treatments were applied in 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2005...

A pot experiment was performed to study the effectiveness of remediation using different plant species and the enzyme response involved in remediating PAH-contaminated soil. The study indicated that species Echinacea purpurea, Festuca arundinacea Schred, Fire Phoenix (a combined F. arundinacea), and Medicago sativa L. possess the potential for remediation in PAH-contaminated soils. The study al...

Understanding determinants of local species diversity remains central to developing plans to preserve biodiversity. In the continental United States, climate, grazing by large mammals, fire, and topography are important ecosystem drivers that structure North American tallgrass prairie, with major impacts on plant community composition and vegetation structure. Frequency of fire and grazing by b...

A flatwoods longleaf pine wiregrass ecosystem, which regenerated naturally following wildfire in 1942, on the Coastal Plain of southern Georgia was treated over a period of four decades with prescribed fire at annual, biennial and triennial intervals during the winter dormant season. Burning caused substantial changes in the understory plant community, with significant reductions in the folk co...

Wildfires have been occurring in terrestrial ecosystems since the early evolution of plants (Bowman et al., 2009; Pausas & Keeley, 2009; Bond & Scott, 2010) and have shaped many species and ecosystems worldwide (Keeley et al., 2011). Plant flammability is an important driver of fire in terrestrial ecosystems and thus has a fundamental role in ecosystem dynamics and species evolution (Belcher et...

Fire safety is an important component of the safe operation of nuclear power plant, and is an important aspect of the nuclear safety. The Distributed Intelligent Fire Detect and Alarm System is of high reliability and sensitivity. In this article, some research will be made on how to limit fire damage by improving the system reliability and sensitivity. Fire safety is an important component of ...